Arab Allies Discern a Double Standard in U.S. Policy Toward World’s Muslims : Middle East: Coalition members decry Iraq strikes while Bosnians and Palestinian deportees are ignored.

America’s Arab allies in the Middle East, who solidly backed the United States in its move two years ago to force Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait, are becoming increasingly estranged because of perceptions that Washington is pursuing a double-standard policy at the expense of the world’s Muslims.

Faced with rising popular anger over allied air strikes against Iraq while the West has failed to take any decisive action against the killing of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Israel’s deportation of Palestinians, key coalition allies such as Egypt and Syria have made it clear that their continued support of U.S. policy in the region is in doubt.

Even Saudi Arabia, whose airstrips have been used as bases for U.S. aircraft flying bombing missions to Iraq, has issued statements in recent days criticizing an apparent “double standard” that seems to many officials in the region to be applied at the expense of Arabs.

Privately, America’s former coalition allies say that the failure of the Mideast peace talks to make any progress, combined with controversy over the new allied air strikes, Bosnia and the Palestinian deportees, has left America’s friends in the region increasingly unable to defend U.S. policy.

“They are making fools of us,” one Egyptian official said bitterly. “The Arabs see that they are raising words about a ‘new world order’ in order to attract Arab support for measures which only serve the interests of the West.”

“We notice the fact that the retaliation against Iraq is very speedy but at the same time there are other places (including Israel and Bosnia) where retaliation is not a formula at all,” added another key official of the Persian Gulf War coalition. “This becomes some sort of provocative issue, and it creates an air which implies that the Arabs are inferior and they are people who are ready and willing to be punished.”

Long after the new bombing raids against Iraq, the Arab world’s press is full of attacks against the United States. “Bush is a War Criminal,” proclaimed a headline in one Islamic newspaper in Cairo, while a leftist weekly declared, “American Aggression Is a Flagrant Act of Belittling Arabs.”

Even the government-controlled press in Egypt, perhaps America’s strongest ally in the Arab world, published open appeals to President Clinton to abandon the course set by former President George Bush and raised doubts that Clinton’s policy would be more palatable to the Arabs. “If we follow Clinton’s line, we find that he accepts and backs up everything Bush did,” said the pro-government Egyptian weekly newspaper October.

Thursday’s ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court refusing to order the return of the Palestinian deportees heightened Arab concern that the United States, under a new Administration even more friendly to Israel than the previous one, would veto any attempt to impose sanctions against Israel to force their return.

The Arab League, which in a contested vote endorsed the dispatching of troops to the Persian Gulf two years ago to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait, has been particularly vehement about the new military strikes against Iraq, and a league official said that the United States must not assume that it has unqualified support from Arabs who endorsed the Gulf War effort.

“We consider the coalition ended with the liberation of Kuwait, and the duty of the international community at this point is to ensure stability and establish security,” Adnan Omran, deputy secretary general of the Arab League, said in an interview.

“Security cannot be done through attacks. We are concerned about stability and security for all the countries in the region. Our strategy is not revenge,” he said.

Jordan, where there is widespread public sympathy for Iraqi President Hussein and his Arab populist message, has seen several street demonstrations calling for the breaking of international sanctions against Iraq.

And in Egypt, officials worry that a cornered but defiant Hussein could appeal to growing Islamic fundamentalist sentiment in this country.

“Everybody knows that for Saddam, it makes him more heroic and satisfies his ego even more while his people suffer,” one Arab government official said. “Can’t the Americans see that?”

The Muslim Brotherhood, the influential godfather of Islamic fundamentalist organizations throughout the Arab world, has steadfastly opposed Hussein because of his vicious crackdowns on Islamic groups in Iraq. Nonetheless, the group has been strongly critical of the new wave of allied air strikes, even if they are designed to unseat the Iraqi leader.

“We are going through a big change in this area, and if people aren’t careful, we are headed for a big conflict,” warned Essam Eryan, an influential leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. “The people are watching now to see if Mr. Clinton and his Administration will comply with his promises during the election, to see if he is really going to defend democracy and human rights.”

Arab governments realize their own dilemma in attacking Washington for pursuing a policy that most of them still favor: ending Hussein’s reign in Iraq.

When deploring the allied air strikes against Iraq, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and officials in Syria have been careful to add that Hussein engaged in activity that brought the need for renewed military action.

Political analysts say some Arab regimes may be issuing strong public statements condemning the bombing while privately gritting their teeth, closing their eyes and urging the United States to get on with nasty but necessary business.

Most Arab regimes have opposed normalization with Iraq just as much as they opposed military action, and none so far has proposed workable measures between the two extremes for dealing with the Baghdad regime.

“Maybe in that sense what has not been said is just as significant as what has been said,” one analyst said.

Some Arabs have suggested simply leaving Hussein in place as long as he engages in no further adventures outside his borders. To do otherwise, they say, risks plunging Iraq into civil war or dividing it into separate Shiite and Sunni Muslim and Kurdish factions that could threaten tenuous borders all over the Middle East.

“We know that having Saddam in power is dangerous and harmful, but there seems to be no means of removing him,” said an official from one of Washington’s Mideast allies. “Really, we don’t know what to do. It’s regrettable that belligerency has flared up again, because it only increases the dangers that Iraq will split up; it increases the misery of the Iraqi people, which also increases their bitterness toward the West--and, looking to the future, it’s very dangerous.”